BMC Medical Ethics is an online journal publishing research articles after full peer review. All articles are published, without barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance. The journal is published by BioMed Central Ltd, Floor 6, 236 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8HB, United Kingdom.

Scope: BMC Medical Ethics is an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on relation to the ethical aspects of biomedical research and clinical practice, including professional choices and conduct, medical technologies, healthcare systems and health policies.

Criteria for publication: Publication of research articles by BMC Medical Ethics is dependent primarily on their validity and coherence, as judged by peer reviewers, who are also asked whether the writing is comprehensible and how interesting they consider the article to be. If an article is of broad interest, the authors may be asked if they would prefer it to be published in BMC Medicine, and the article may be highlighted in a variety of ways as a service to our readers and contributors.

Speed of publication: BMC Medical Ethics offers a very fast publication schedule while maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published electronically in manuscript form immediately upon acceptance. A fully structured web version, and accompanying laid out PDF, will be published within a few weeks of acceptance.

Flexibility: As an electronic-only journal, BMC Medical Ethics offers authors the opportunity to publish large data sets, large numbers of illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Submission of manuscripts: Manuscripts must be submitted to BMC Medical Ethics electronically using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

The New York Times reports on a growing concern about researchers’ misconduct and journal editors’ need to retract previously published articles:

The journal [Infection and Immunity] wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

Evidence-based approaches to reducing sexual transmission of HIV has remained a major challenge in responding to the HIV pandemic. The past 18 months has witnessed a substantial shift in this landscape. Controlled trials have demonstrated that the treatment of individuals with HIV infection reduces the risk of viral transmission to uninfected sexual partners (treatment as prevention). Additional evidence suggests the possibility of providing anti-retroviral medications to uninfected individuals may reduce the risk of acquiring HIV infection from sexual partners (PrEP— Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis). In view of scarce resources, there will inevitably be a need to prioritize who will get anti-retroviral drugs; those who are sick, those who can transmit HIV, those at risk for acquiring HIV. Research that focuses on the balance between efficiency and equity will be involved. Ethical frameworks for guiding decision-making at the clinical level as well as the macro social policy level will be essential.

Among the questions that will need to be discussed are:

i. What rights claims can uninfected persons make for access to ARVs for prophylactic purposes when millions across the globe are dying from AIDS because they cannot access ARV treatment?

ii. What moral claims can justify the provision of ARV therapy to those who do not yet clinically require treatment as a way of reducing the risks of HIV transmission?

iii. What normative issues are raised in making the determination that there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of either PrEP or Treatment for Prevention?

iv. How should the social and biological vulnerability of women to HIV infection inform discussion about the allocations of resources for either PrEP or treatment as prevention?

v. If there is a risk that PrEP will increase the risk of drug resistance and compromise treatment options for those already infected, what ethical questions must be confronted?

vi. What conceptions of procedural fairness and inclusiveness should shape decision making processes about these allocation decisions?

vii. How should current research findings inform the ethics of trial design?

viii. Given current evidence what moral issues involving the protection of research subjects should be considered in determining the extent of ancillary services and care that should be provided in prevention trials?

Upon submission authors should include full contact details and a few lines of autobiographical information in a separate electronic file. We discourage papers of more than 5000 words. For further submission requirements, format and referencing style, refer to the Author Guidelines on the Developing World Bioethics website: http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dewb

The 2012 Colorado Healthcare Ethics Forum Conference will be held April 26th and 27th, 2012 at The Stonebrook Manor Event Center and Gardens in Thornton, Colorado. This year’s theme is Borders and Barriers: Mapping a Moral Path. Ethics is a process of choosing among different paths, each path having its own unique obstacles and challenges. Some obstacles are moral in nature as we attempt to address conflicts among ethical principles or different methods of assessing the moral dimensions of a situation. Other challenges relate to conflicts among deeply held beliefs, values and preferences among patients, families, providers and the community at large. Finally, many obstacles are practical such as those involving scarce resources, limited time, lack of knowledge and uncertain outcomes. Borders are the diverse lines we often must cross when making ethical decisions including legal and regulatory requirements or competing political, social, religious and moral beliefs. Borders also include the fine lines between patients and families, providers and/or the organization. Barriers include all of the practical realities that seem to challenge our efforts at moral action including ineffective communication, lack of support, scarce resources and limited options.

The two day conference will have a Hot Topics track that will focus on high profile issues in the healthcare headlines and an Issues in Practice track that will focus on highly applied topics for individual and ethics committee development. Proposals are sought on a wide range of topics. Suggestions include:

The Colorado Healthcare Ethics Forum is an active and diverse community of health professionals and laypersons in Colorado who work collaboratively to raise the awareness of ethical issues, promote ethical practice and respond to current and future ethical challenges in the delivery of health care. The annual CHEF conference attracts 150-175 participants annually and is well recognized throughout the Rocky Mountain region. For more on the vision, mission and values of CHEF, visit our website at http://coloradoethicsforum.org/ .

The purpose of this conference is twofold: firstly, to engage researchers with different cultural, political, philosophical, religious backgrounds in a debate on the close relation between entity and identity in bioethics; and secondly, to obtain a better theoretical understanding of the identities of those that engage in bioethical debates. The International Conference will take place at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris from 23 to 24 April 2012 at and it is organized by Ars Identitatis Cultural Research Association. The proceedings will be published (after peer review): some in paperback format, the others in electronic format. Ars Identitatis encourages interdisciplinary debates, that is why we are inviting anyone who could contribute to this debate (Professors, Researchers, Journalists, NGO activists, Lawyers, Clerics, etc.). Submissions from graduate students are also encouraged. We accept both Panel proposals and Individual abstracts. Individual abstracts should be of no more than 450 words in length. Those who intend to send individual abstracts are kindly requested to submit also a short bio note. The person who submits a panel proposal is kindly requested to send us a short Curriculum Vitae (one page) together with a presentation of the panel and the abstracts. The other panelists should send only a short bio-note. Each panel proposal should contain at least two abstracts. The deadline for sending abstracts is February 10 but we encourage early submissions, in order to allow the selection commission to have enough time for deliberation. We will acknowledge receipt of your abstract. In case you don’t receive any reply from us after 3 days, please resend your abstract.

Ars Identitatis is an independent non-profit association. We are making efforts to keep as low as possible the logistics costs related to the conference and to the publication production process.

The patient occupies a liminal, unstable position, precariously situated between home and hospital, work and bed, life and death. Although attended by doctors, nurses, family and friends, her condition—particularly if it is chronic—threatens to sever her connections with the world and to exile her into that fundamental solitude owned by the sick and suffering. Immersed in a medical system that seeks optimum outcomes with zero errors, the patient receives care delivered with industrial efficiency. Advances in diagnostic and therapeutic modalities provide both cure and control of chronic illness not imagined a decade ago. The patient, then, poised to benefit on multiple fronts, should be increasingly satisfied with the medical encounter; yet many patients feel alienated or even violated by the medical system. Many health care professionals also lament weaknesses in their technology-driven profession.

What defines a quality medical encounter from the patient’s perspective? What do medical practitioners—nurses, physicians, social workers—value in their relationship with the patient? How is this relationship preserved and nurtured? What are the opportunities or perils in the physician-patient relationship? It seems timely to counteract the quantification of the patient by the health care industry and to call for a humanistic reconstitution of the patient’s experience and situation—to reconsider, rethink, and empathically re-imagine the patient in her environments, ancient and contemporary, intimate and social. We invite papers from a wide range of perspectives—humanist, medical, artistic—addressing one or more of the following topics:

the patient in literary contexts

the patient in film

the patient in self-help books and pathographies

the dying patient

the identity of the patient

from person to patient

the patient and communication

the ill and the well

the chronic patient

the caregiver

the quality medical encounter from the perspective of the patient

the quality medical encounter from the perspective of the physician

biomedical ethics

the patient in the history of medicine

the patient in medical anthropology and sociology

patient empowerment

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4th November 2011. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 9th March 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords. E-mails should be entitled: THE PATIENT Abstract Submission. Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

The conference is part of the Persons series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume. For further details of the project, please visit: